Burka Beats: My Top 15(ish) Favorite Muslimgauze albums.





Bryn Jones was the one man army behind Muslimgauze. The man was crazy prolific, with something close to 150 albums on his discography. He died when he was 38 years old, close to 10 years ago. What follows are my favorites from his catalogue:

15. Gun Aramaic
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This is the best of Muslimgauze's ambient efforts. Great washes of ambient noise over collages of echoed voices and percussion. Ominous and trance-inducing

14. Mazar-I-Sharif

Lots of bombastic, pounding beats over sampled Middle Eastern music. His abrubt idiosyncratic changes in volume and distortion keep it interesting.

13. Hummus

A lof of different styles make up this one; Some really clean sounding dancy numbers, some loops that swell in and out of distorion, and some pretty ambient pieces.


12. Vampire of Tehran
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Rhythmic and hypnotic, with a little dub thrown in here and there. Sampled arab vocals here and there pepper this album

11. Izlamaphobia

Abrasivie percussion and noisy samples work together to make somehting that's almost Aphex Twin-esque at times.

10. Hussein Mahmood Jeeb Tehar Gass

This one is smooth, and really pretty. Lots of dub, drum and bass, and eveb hip-hip influcences - but with a middle eastern accent, of course.

9. Your Mines in Kabul

A triple CD. Big distorted beats over traditional arab instruments doing funky things are what stand out for me. A groovy 31 minute track called "Lahore" rounds this album out.

8. Observe with Sadiq Bey

This is more traditional in flavor than a lot of his albums. The samples and distortion are still here, but more subtle. Also, a pretty laid-back kind of release.

7. Box of Silk and Dogs



















This is really 9 albums released together, posthumously. I think this was a way to get some of his unreleased material out of the vaults. It's excellent material. Descriptions of the individual albums from the press release:

Disc 1: "Hindu Kush On" (15 tracks/61:36m) Combines unusual Underground Resistance Detroit-isms with the recent sounds of MiniDisc electro-scuzz. Mantric slap-funk guitar blends audaciously in the rhythmic fold. Near-dance floor grooves are fragmented, infected with non-traditional methods and ancient sounds. Voices interweave from beyond the ether; it veers from barely audible peaking into full-on waves of distortion and back again.

Disc 2: "Rhiza Coil Of Rezin" (5 tracks/25:44m) Explosive drum'n'bass(y) sans break beats. He sharpens an innocuous set of North African wind instruments with an acid-edge. Themes from "Narcotic" are revisited.

Disc 3: "Sect Of Hari Krishna" (4 tracks/30:23m) The first set of longer cuts, Jones lays down faux-Miami Bass tracks, hurtling them into the future. Like Carl Craig, Jones' talent allows all possible combinations of percussion to carry the melodic aspects of a piece.

Disc 4: "Keffeen Head" (12 tracks/65:49m) Heavy-echo dub-guitar excursions ebb and flow into insane (or unlikely) horizons. The musical equivalent to an intra-brain game of Pong, his radical minimalism is punctuated by furious bursts of surrealism. Conventional beats extrude into progressing realms of degeneration.

Disc 5: "Deceiver (Part Three)" (11 tracks/46:18m) A spiritual continuation of the earlier limited double CD "Deceiver" set. The most out disc of the set thus far, defying points of reference. A low-intensity warfare, it draws on Jones' vast hip-hop resources.

Disc 6: "Ingaza" (17 tracks/67:07 m) Perhaps the most conventional in terms of structure, this disc contains glorious riffage, Aphex and Oval nods, and (even) near-songs!

Disc 7: "Staalplaat Sonderangebote Re-mixs" (4 tracks/24:46m) Four bands on Staalplaat given the Muslimgauze treatment: Spoke (O Yuki Conjugate), Reptilicus, Fetisch Park, and Bad Sector. Not surprisingly, they all end up sounding like Muslimgauze.

Disc 8: "Zuriff Moussa (Part Three)" (13 tracks/63:25m) Another thematic continuation of 1998's "Zuriff Moussa" CD (okay, but where's Part Two?). Sounds for all the world like the programming wizardry of Keith LeBlanc handled with the nimble touch of Autechre.

Disc 9: "Hafaz Al Assad" (18 tracks/60:34m) Radio Muslimgauze. Short sound bites meld into passive-aggressive soundscapes held together by traditional instrumentation and more disembodied voices.

6. Narcotic
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Atmospheric sounds layered with interesting instrumentation. Mysterious and exotic sounding throughout

5. Alms for Iraq
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Another abrasive one. Some of the best industrial strength Middle Eastern music you'll find anywhere

4. Sufiq



















This one is upbeat and traditional in sound. I've seen videos of belly dancers using music form this album. Great use of Indian samples make this something special.

3. Tandoori Dog

This was a 4 record long vinyl-only release. I love this record. There are some dreamy, low-key pieces on here that I could listen to all day long. Some aggressive stuff here, too.

2. Uzbekistani Bizzare and Souk

This is the first Muslimgauze album that I heard. One of his more innovative albums. Unusual noise loops are worked into his infectious percussive grooves. The some of the tracks get really noisy and abstract - which is a good thing.

1. Farouk Enjineer



















The most left-field, noisy, strange and unique Muslimgauze album in existance. Parts sound like they're being played through broken speakers, the volume shifts abrubtly, garbled vocal loops come through. One of the best examples of "experimental" music .. . ever.

Some polaroid emulsion transfers I've done:

3 hafler trio albums

My interest in the Hafler Trio's work has been recently rekindled, and I've been buying hafler work like mad lately. Thier recent work is really fantastic, I guess minimal is the word to characterize. Vastly more interesting than most of the "ambient" music that exists out there.

"A pressed on sandwich"
A collaboration with Colin Potter, a great electronic drone master in his own right who has been a part of Nurse With Wound for the past 10+ years - which, perhaps by no coincidence, has been NWW's best work. A Pressed on Sandwich is a fantastic electronic drone piece - several sublte buzzes rising in and out like breath gradually build in intensity, then fade out again over the course of 53 minutes. This has been getting pretty heavy rotation at my pad.









"Exactly as I do"
This one is a collaboration with Jón Þór Birgisson from Sigur Ros, sort of. Jonsi supplied the voice, Andrew McKenzie transformed it into someting else entirely. It feels very organic, and the sound in some places has an especially textured feel. Some Hafler trio releases the sound have a very tactile quality about it, and this is one.

This is two discs long - one disc being more Monochromatic, the being more dynamic. Thouroughly enjoyable if you have a taste for this sort of thing.





"Where are You?"

Another offering from the Hafler Trio's series of albums construced from voice. This one features David Tibet from Current 93 suppling the voice, while Andrew McKenzie twists it up. This release lies somewhere between the dark assembalages for Early Current 93, a la Nature Unveiled, and the minimalism of the Hafler Trio's recent work. The Last 20 minutes of this sounds like ghosts in a windtunnel.









I might add that the packaging on all of these is really elaborate, like little avant garde french poetry books from 1900.

Salt Marie Celeste

In 1872 a ship named The Mary Celeste was found off the coast of Poutugal. None of the Mary Celeste's crew or passengers were ever found.

Nurse With Wound's excellent "Salt Marie Celeste" sounds what one might expect an abandoned ship would sound like drifting aimlessly in the fog at night. It begins with two droning chords, coming in and out like waves. Gradually through the course of it's 63 minutes, loops are added one by one; creaking boards, strange rattles, a ghostly fog horn. Towards the end, the extraneous loops fade out and leave only the sound of water and the droning chords.

Ominous, lonely and haunting. This is one of the best minimal recordings I've ever heard, and certainly one of my favorite Nurse With Wound releases.

Polish Movie Posters

I've recently discovered the world of Polish movie posters. Below are a few that I really liked, some from movies I've heard of, some are a little more obscure. These posters are a lot more conceptual and, for lack of a better word, artistic than the ones you see today in America. There are also tons of polish posters for plays and operas, but I didn't include any of those below. Who knew that the Polish had such a great tradition of graphic design?

To Kill a Mockingbird

The Hill

Peppermint Frappe

The Omen

The Birds

Star Wars

Blow up

Siirska ledi Magbet

polish movie posters

My teenage daughter
Lord of the flies
Le Milion
Freud: The secrest passion
Eagle in a Cage
Dersu Usala
Cabaret
Battleship Potiomkin
A child is waiting

Scenes from Les simulacres de la Mort by Hans Holbein

In 1538, Hans Holbein the Younger published his Dance of death, featuring scenes of people from all walks of life being led away by death. Of course, this morbid imagery is a reflection of the plague that was still raging throughout Europe. Fittingly, Holbein died of the plague some years later. I find these pretty interesting.